Your arms are long for your height. Everyone tells you this. Good for hugs and pulling down rebounds in pickup basketball. Even better, you soon realize, to grab the kids and throw them back, even the ones who kick and scream, the ones who pull your hair into fists, the ones who, for whatever reason, can’t wait to grow up. Who would want such a thing?
You weren’t even supposed to go to work, but once you got the job description, you figured wandering around in rye fields all day and catching kids falling off cliffs wouldn’t be so bad. You can do this; You can become an easier place for children to regain their innocence before they return to it. And, selfishly, it would be a good chance to see some sunshine and get nice and brown before heading to P-Town, where you’ll probably have all the twinks and dykes going crazy over you. Get something for once. It’s been ten years since you got divorced. Ex-wife never calls, only responds to your messages. Little thumbs-ups that you can just stick in your eyes.
Despite trying, both of you never had children. It does something like that to a couple, suicidal silence after failure. How can all this happen?
First, you broke the door handle, then another negative test later, you broke the entire doorknob, and it felt so good, so obvious, that you thought you’d spend the rest of your life breaking things just to enjoy in disbelief later. enjoy. That was the name you chose, carrying around on a piece of paper in your pocket like a wish.
“What happened to the last catcher?” you asked your boss in your first and only interview.
“Couldn’t stand the pressure.” “Where do babies come from?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Everywhere? No one really knows. They just show up, and we do what we have to do.”
“And what exactly is that?”
“Keep them innocent as long as humanly possible.” “Okay,” you said. “I can handle a little pressure.”
“You need extreme conditioning and an uncanny ability to take some punches,” he said. “Some kids just stumble and fall, they don’t know what hit them. But some jump on their own will. They’re the ones who really don’t want to go back.” He yawned and then looked towards the door, ready to usher me out and continue his day. He probably did not have children of his own. Maybe he liked complaining about them on airplanes.
You told him about your track career in college, and waved your long arms, showing off a bit.
He looked you up and down in agreement. “Keep in mind,” he said, “that there are other people who do not slide or jump; they are pushed.”
“what do you mean?”
He lowered his voice. “You know, by a parent, or a babysitter, or a weird uncle. Or, like, a priest.”
“Oh,” you said, then you went home to cry yourself into sleep.
First day on the job, miles of rye fields in front of you, sunlight coloring the long grass a golden orange, giving you the worst farmer look. So the next day you take off your t-shirt and catch all the kids wearing binders, although after a while the binders start to hurt. You can’t walk away that easily. Your breath hitches, suspecting that you don’t know how to read those online size tables, those in small print, relying on little insanities like strings and tape measures. Either way, babies don’t mind bare skin; They’re happy that you’re hanging them upside down, that you’re tickling their armpits and their tummies and the soles of their feet, that you’re eating them out and making them scream out loud. They beg for more.
“Turn me into mud,” he says.
“Call me booger,” he says. “Again, again,” he says.
And you do it every time. Don’t try to think about which children had their childhood cut short because of power and who had it. You love them all very, very much and very much; You want to keep them, even if it doesn’t work out that way.
You briefly consider whether you too have gone through the same thing, who might have caught you and when. Or did you slip through their arms into the jaws of adolescence? There is an empty space in your memory where your childhood should have been. You don’t know what it means, but you know it can’t be good.
When you catch them – the orange Cheeto-dust-covered kids, the ketchup-faced kids, the kids with missing teeth, the peanut-butter-fingered kids, the barefoot and uncaring dog-stool kids – you imagine you’re giving the show of a lifetime. You imagine the most beautiful people in the world looking at you, pointing and covering their mouths in awe. You imagine that you will make them cry with your singing of happiness and innocence, of catching and returning, like a disciplined fisherman. You imagine your beauty the way beautiful people see it: uninhibited, pure. Great.
You, with your long arms and strong will, throw the children hundreds of feet in the air, to the top of the cliff, where they can return to their adult lives and bedtimes, with their playgrounds, secret gardens and belief in the intoxicating power of laughter and the belief that good always triumphs over evil, that evil is a mean old witch in the woods, not the estate planner next door or the man sleeping across the room.
But after a few weeks of this, you’re dead-legged and sunburned, suffering from the heat and unmotivated. P-Town came and went, and you watched too much and didn’t connect enough, criticized too much, rejected too much: not them, not her, and Definitely Not that. A strong longing for something indescribable, something that feels more like an absence, a negative space around one, than a body. You drank whatever you got – shooters, shots, cocktails, frozen drinks that gave you brain freeze – but never rye whiskey, never rye. There were children, in parades and on boats. Wherever you look, there are families, dead bodies hanging upon dead bodies, hands wrestling with each other. Mouths full of teeth that will only bite to protect the child. You won’t make eye contact, won’t fixate on their cute little faces so that one day you won’t recognize them in your arms. It would be too much to know them from the outside world.
Anyway, your legs are tired and achy, your joints ache, and your quota has fallen short. You keep letting children slip out of your lap during adolescence. Everywhere, in big cities and small towns, kids have grown up into adulthood, even among the affluent, even among kids raised by gentle parents, even among kids with skate and surf camps, guitar lessons, and college funds.
Suddenly, six-year-old kids are saying things like i will work till i die And How are the interest rates now? And I can’t believe it’s tax season again And Work cannot be everything in life And I’m not sure I’ll ever know real happiness And If love is true, I have never felt it.
They stop using their imagination to play family, magic, swamp monsters, dragons and dinosaurs and start using it to imagine the worst. They imagine time as a threat, its sweet scratches and tangles. stop saying things like Next year, I went to the zoo. Time is now linear, there is an edge, a threshold, and there is no way out except to cross it.
The kids you still hold say things like Oh, you date all genders? Neat, where is your navel? And You Isn’t any boy or girl cool—wanna watch me lick your feet?
The ones you don’t catch, the ones you miss because it’s too much – running back and forth, holding them close, tossing them back to safety – they run past you, dragging their hands through the tall grass, shouting over their shoulders, You’re so disgusting, no one will want you! And We used to be a fair country! And I hope someone hits you in the face.
This should bother you, but it’s almost a relief. This is proof that children are not born with hatred in their stomach and blood.
Here’s what you don’t do: You don’t resign, even though you get multiple warnings, even though the kids keep slipping out of your arms, even though you tell your boss that this is the job of thousands upon thousands of people and you’re just one. You don’t resign yourself to the playground slowly emptying and the swings becoming haunted. You don’t resign, although you should get better at accepting failure.
What you do: You call your ex-wife and tell her on voicemail how every child and no child looks exactly like the one you two ever had, how they have the same charming eyes and their same magic carpet eyelashes that defy gravity and everything heavy. You tell her how some kids are inspired by someone they trust. And how the lucky ones, yes the lucky ones, are blindfolded and taken to the shore so that they cannot see who it was that pushed them. They don’t see any faces, just the ground roaring towards them. That way, when you grab them and throw them back into childhood, they don’t have to know, they don’t have to face that knowing, despite being told to love them anyway. Maybe one day, they’ll be like you: a person who appears to have just appeared as an adult one day, with no childhood to speak of.
You tell him from the voicemail that you’ve never been able to identify who’s pushing them – they’re too far away, and from what you can tell, none of them look like the villains children are taught to fear. At night, when you sit on the veranda and look at the sky through the ruined trees, when you take your sleeping pills and painkillers, tired of your heart beating stupidly, too fast and too worried, when you read in bed without enough light, when you finally close your eyes and count the children falling off the cliff – one, two, three, four – and fall asleep somewhere around five hundred, it After all is done, you have a red-hot, swallowing dream. You dream of recognizing those faces forever. You dream of fistfuls of hair, you dream of your knee’s broken cheekbone, you dream of left hooks, right hooks, the floor, you dream of bloody knuckles and teeth shattered like teeth. You dream of violence that is so natural, so natural that you become afraid of it yourself. but it’s not like that. It excites you; This is what you are made for: not to catch but to take revenge. You dream of bodies hitting the floor, of a victory that no one sees but everyone can feel.
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From Employee By Mac Crane. Used with permission of the publisher, The Dial Press. Copyright © 2026 by Mac Crane.
